As a constitutent, I hope you will read the following article that appears in the July
9, 1999 edition of Insight Magazine. It illustrates very well how child support
enforcement, which is federally mandated, destroys families. I concur with the opinions
expressed in the article.

I was made aware of this article by ANCPR, Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights. I
urge you to contact them in order to receive an information packet that further
substantiates the destructive effect of the draconian child support enforcement laws that
have been enacted in recent years. Their address is:

Yes: This engine of the divorce industry is destroying families and the Constitution.

By Stephen Baskerville

. . . . Geoff came home one day to find a note on the kitchen table saying his wife had
taken their two children to live with their grandparents. He quit his job as head of his
department in a university and followed. He was summoned to court on eight-hours' notice
and, without a lawyer and without being permitted to speak, was stripped of custody rights
and ordered to stay away from his wife and children most of the time. Because he had no
job, no car and no place to live, his mother cancelled a pending sale of her house, and he
moved in with her. Geoff and his mother now pay about $1,200 a month to his wife and her
wealthy parents, and he is left to live and care for his two children on about $700 a
month. A judge also threatened him with jail if he did not pay a lawyer he had not hired.
When his temporary job ends, the payments must continue, and he is not permitted to care
for the children while unemployed. He also expects to be coerced into paying more legal
fees. He has never been charged with any wrongdoing, either criminal or civil.

. . . . Geoff's experience increasingly is common. In fact, it is epidemic. Massive
numbers of fathers who are accused of no wrongdoing now are separated from their children,
plundered for everything they have, publicly vilified and incarcerated without trial.

. . . . About 24 million American children live in homes where the father is not
present, with devastating consequences for both the children and society. Crime, drug and
alcohol abuse, truancy, teenage pregnancy, suicide and psychological disorders are a few
of the tragic consequences. Conventional wisdom assumes that the fathers of these children
have abandoned them. In this case the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrong. It is far
more likely that an "absent" father is forced away rather than leaving
voluntarily.

. . . . In his new study, Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths, Sanford Braver of
Arizona State University has shown conclusively that the so-called "deadbeat
dad," one who deserts his children and evades child support, "does not exist in
significant numbers." Braver confirms that, contrary to popular belief, at least
two-thirds of divorces are filed by mothers, who have virtual certainty of getting the
children and a huge portion of the fathers' income, regardless of any fault on their part.
The title of Ashton Applewhite's 1997 book says it succinctly: Cutting Loose: Why Women
Who End Their Marriages Do So Well.

. . . . Other studies have found even higher percentages of divorces filed by mothers,
and lawyers report that, when children are involved, divorce is the initiative of the
mother in virtually all instances. Moreover, few of these divorces involve grounds such as
desertion, adultery or violence. The most frequent reasons given are "growing
apart" or "not feeling loved or appreciated." (Surveys consistently show
that fathers are much more likely than mothers to believe parents should remain married.)
Yet, as Braver reports, despite this involuntary loss of their children, 90 percent of
these deserted fathers regularly pay court-ordered child support (unemployment being the
main reason for nonpayment), often at exorbitant levels and many without any rights to see
their children. Most make heroic efforts to stay in contact with the children from whom
they are forcibly separated.

. . . . The plight of unmarried inner-city fathers is harder to quantify, but there is
no reason to assume they love their children any less. A recent study conducted in
Washington with low-income fathers ages 16 to 25 found that 63 percent had only one child;
82 percent had children by only one mother; 50 percent had been in a serious relationship
with the mother at the time of pregnancy; only 3 percent knew the mother of their child
only a little; 75 percent visited their child in the hospital; 70 percent saw their
children at least once a week; 50 percent took their child to the doctor; large
percentages reported bathing, feeding, dressing and playing with their children; and 85
percent provided informal child support in the form of cash or purchased goods such as
diapers, clothing and toys. University of Texas anthropologist Laura Lein and Rutgers
University professor Kathryn Edin recently found that low-income fathers often are far
worse off than their government-assisted families, "but economically and emotionally
marginal as many of these fathers are, they still represent a large proportion of
low-income fathers who continue to make contributions to their children's households and
to maintain at least some level of relationship with those children."

. . . . Yet the voices of these fathers rarely are heard in the public arena. Instead
we hear the imprecations of a government conducting what may be the most massive
witch-hunt in this country's history. Never before have we seen the spectacle of the
highest officials in the land -- including the president, the attorney general and other
Cabinet secretaries, and leading members of Congress from both parties -- using their
offices as platforms from which publicly to vilify private citizens who have been
convicted of nothing and who have no opportunity to reply.

. . . . Under the guise of pursuing deadbeat dads, we now are seeing mass
incarcerations without trial, without charge and without counsel, while the media and
civil libertarians look the other way. We also have government officials freely entering
the homes and raiding the bank accounts of citizens who are accused of nothing and simply
helping themselves to whatever they want -- including their children, their life savings
and their private papers and effects, all with hardly a word of protest noted.

. . . . And these are fathers who are accused of nothing. Those who face trumped-up
accusations of child abuse also must prove their innocence before they can hope to see
their children. Yet now it is well established that most child abuse takes place in the
homes of single mothers. A recent study from the Department of Health and Human Services,
or HHS, found that "almost two-thirds [of child abusers] were females." Given
that male perpetrators are not necessarily fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends
and stepfathers, fathers emerge as the least likely child abusers. A British study by
Robert Whelan in 1993 titled Broken Homes and Battered Children concluded that a child
living with a single mother is up to 33 times more likely to be abused than a child living
in an intact family. The argument of many men legally separated from their families is
that the real abusers have thrown the father out of the family so they can abuse his
children with impunity.

. . . . In Virginia alone the state Division of Child Support Enforcement now is
"pursuing" 428,000 parents for up to $1.6 billion, according to its director,
Nick Young. In a state of fewer than 7 million people, the parents of 552,000 children are
being "pursued." That is the parents of roughly half the state's minor dependent
children. HHS claims that almost 20 million fathers in the nation are being pursued for
something close to $50 billion. We are being asked to believe that half the fathers in
America have abandoned their children willfully.

. . . . These figures essentially are meaningless. If they indicate anything it is the
scale on which families are being taken over by a destructive and dangerous machine
consisting of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, social workers, bureaucrats and women's
groups -- all of whom have a direct financial interest in separating as many children from
their fathers as possible, vilifying and plundering the fathers and turning them into
criminals. The machine is so riddled with conflicts of interest that it is little less
than a system of organized crime. Here is how it works: Judges are appointed and promoted
by the lawyers and "custody evaluators," into whose pockets they funnel fees;
the judges also are influenced with payments of federal funds from child-support
enforcement bureaucracies that depend on a constant supply of ejected fathers;
child-support guidelines are written by the bureaucracies that enforce them and by private
collection companies that have a financial stake in creating as many arrearages and
"deadbeat dads" as possible. These guidelines are then enacted by legislators,
some of whom divert the enforcement contracts to their own firms, sometimes even taking
personal kickbacks (as charged in a recent federal indictment in Arkansas). Legislators
who control judicial appointments also get contracts (and kickbacks, again the case in
Arkansas) for providing legal services at government expense in the courts of their
appointees. And, of course, custody decisions and child-support awards must be generous
enough to entice more mothers to take the children and run, thus bringing a fresh supply
of fathers into the system. In short, child support is the financial fuel of the divorce
industry. It has very little to do with the needs of children and everything to do with
the power and profit of large numbers of adults.

. . . . For their part, politicians can register their concern for fatherless children
relatively cheaply by endlessly (and futilely) stepping up "child-support"
collection while creating programs ostensibly designed to "reunite" fathers with
their children. Even some fatherhood advocates jump on the bandwagon, attacking
"absent" fathers while holding their tongues about the judicial kidnapping of
their children. Though almost everyone now acknowledges the importance of fathers, for too
many there are more political and financial rewards in targeting them as scapegoats than
in the more costly task of upholding the constitutional rights of fathers and their
children not to be ripped apart.

. . . . There is no evidence that endless "crackdowns" on evicted fathers
serve any purpose other than enriching those in the cracking-down business. With child-
support enforcement now a $3 billion national industry, the pursuit of the elusive
deadbeat yields substantial profits, mostly at public expense. "In Florida last
year," writes Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel, "taxpayers paid $4.5
million for the state to collect $162,000 from fathers"; and the story is the same
elsewhere.

. . . . Instead of the easy fiction that massive numbers of fathers are suddenly and
inexplicably abandoning their children, perhaps what we should believe instead is that a
lucrative racket now is cynically using our children as weapons and tools to enrich
lawyers and provide employment for judges and bureaucrats. Rather than pursuing ever
greater numbers of fathers with ever more Draconian punishments, the Justice Department
should be investigating the kind of crimes it was created to pursue -- such as kidnapping,
extortion and racketeering -- in the nation's family courts.